Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

Peter nodded in the direction of his table. “Come along,” he 2 2 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h said. “Join us. That’s Hugh and Pippa Lockhart at our table.

They met playing together in the Really Terrible Orchestra with us. She’s less terrible at the trumpet than he is—in fact, she’s quite good. You’ll like them. Come on.”

She rose to her feet. The remains of the evening could be salvaged, a small scrap of dignity recovered. She had had misunderstandings with Jamie before, and she would apologise to him tomorrow. And then she reminded herself who she was.

She was the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. She was not a love-struck girl abandoned by a petulant boyfriend. These were restorative thoughts, and her mood lifted. She had done her duty and given him the advice that she was morally obliged to give him, so she had nothing to reproach herself for there.

And, besides all this, she had the overwhelmingly good news that he would not be leaving Edinburgh. It was as if a weather warning had been lifted. There had been a mistake: winter was cancelled and we would move straight to spring.

So she crossed the restaurant to join Peter and Susie, oblivious to the furtive, pitying glances from those who had witnessed the sudden departure of Jamie. She held her head high; she had no need of pity. She might apologise to Jamie tomorrow, but she had no reason to apologise to these people. Edinburgh was a nosy town. People should mind their own business.

C H A P T E R T W E N T Y

E

SHE LIKED THE ROAD out to West Linton, and always had.

It snaked round the side of the Pentland Hills, past old farm-steads and fields of grazing sheep, past steep hillsides of heather and scars of scree, past Nine Mile Burn and Carlops; and all the while, to the south-east, the misty Lammermuirs, blue and distant, crouched against the horizon. It was a drive that was too short for her, for the thoughts that she wanted to think on such a road, and she would gladly, if ridiculously, have doubled back and turned round and done it all over again so that she could prolong the pleasure. But she had a mission, a meeting with Jean Macleod, whom she had phoned and asked to see. She had said, I need to talk to you about your son, the son you lost, and the woman at the other end of the line had caught her breath and been silent for a moment before she said that Isabel could come and see her.

The village of West Linton clung to the side of a hill. The Edinburgh road followed a high contour, with the village itself hugging the hillside down to the low ground below. On either side of the Edinburgh road there were Victorian villas, houses with wide gardens and conservatories and names that one might 2 3 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h see in any small town in Scotland, names redolent of a douce Scotland of golf and romanticism. It was not Isabel’s world; she was urban, not small town, but she knew it to be the Scottish hinterland, ignored by the cities, condescended to by the urban-ites, but still there. It was a Scotland of quiet manners and reserved friendliness, a Scotland in which nothing much happened, where lives were lived unadventurously, and sometimes narrowly, to the grave. The lives of such people could be read in the local kirkyard, their loyalty and their persistence etched into granite: Thomas Anderson, Farmer of East Mains, Beloved Husband of fifty-two years of . . . and so on. These were people with a place, wed to the very ground in which they would eventually be placed. The urban dead were reduced to ashes, disposed of, leaving no markers, and then forgotten; memory here was longer and gave the illusion that we counted for more. It was a simple matter of identity, thought Isabel. If people do not know who we are, then naturally we are the less to them. Here, in this village, everybody would know who the other was, which made that crucial difference.

She branched off the main road and slowly wound her way down into the village. On either side of the narrow main street, small stone buildings rose—houses, shops, a pocket-sized hotel.

There was a bookshop run by somebody she knew, and she would call in there afterwards, but for now she had to find the Wester Dalgowan Cottage, to which Jean Macleod had given her careful directions.

It was just off the road that led towards Peebles and Moffat—a small house constructed from the grey stone of the valley, at the end of a short section of potholed, unpaved track. Behind it the open fields stretched away to the south; in front of it a small patch of untended garden, suffocated by thriving rhodo-F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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dendrons, gave the house privacy from the road. An old Land Rover, painted in British racing green, was parked beside the house.

The front door opened as Isabel approached it and Jean Macleod stepped out to greet her visitor. They shook hands, awkwardly, and Isabel noticed that Jean’s skin was rough and dry. The hands of a farmer, she thought.

“You found your way,” said Jean. “People often drive right past us and end up on the Moffat road.”

“I know the village a bit,” said Isabel. “I occasionally come out to see Derek Watson at his bookshop. I like this place.”

“It’s changing,” said Jean. “But we’re happy enough. We used to be quite an important little town, you know. When they drove the cattle down to the Borders. Then we went to sleep for a century or so.”

Jean ushered her into the front room of the cottage, a small sitting room furnished simply but comfortably. There was a table at one side piled with papers and journals. Isabel noticed a copy of the Veterinary Journal and drew her conclusions. Jean noticed her glance. “Yes,” she said. “I’m a vet. I help out in a practice near Penicuik. It’s small animal work. I used to do a lot of horses, but nowadays . . .” She left the sentence unfinished.

She looked out of the window, out towards the fields on the other side of the road.

Isabel had learnt from her visit to the other Macleod. She would be direct now.

“I’m very sorry about your son,” she said. “I don’t know you and I didn’t know him. But I’m sorry.”

Jean nodded. “Thank you.” She looked at Isabel, waiting for her to continue. But then she said, “I take it that you’re one of the bipolar support group. Have you got a child affected by it?”

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